What Sprites To Make?

[TheChatotMaestro]

I’m redoing the art for my project, and I want to cut down on the amount of sprites there are to a small set of basic expressions. What set of faces do you think I need to start out with? I’ll add more specific ones as the scenes require them, but I’d like to know what a good baseline is. There’s a lot of characters, so I’d like to not do what I did last time, which was like three variations on every emotion I could think of... T_T
It’s just going to be changing faces on a static body, if that matters.

[Zelan]

A good baseline is neutral, happy, sad, angry, and surprised. I also find it useful to look and see if any of the characters have a more specific, frequently recurring emotion (e.g. a character who is always hungry may drool and/or have sparkling eyes).

What you could also do rather than create a baseline: if your script is already finished, go through the entire script and note down what expressions a character would have at each moment. Then you'll know exactly what you need to draw before you start drawing it.

[TheChatotMaestro]

A good baseline is neutral, happy, sad, angry, and surprised. I also find it useful to look and see if any of the characters have a more specific, frequently recurring emotion (e.g. a character who is always hungry may drool and/or have sparkling eyes).

What you could also do rather than create a baseline: if your script is already finished, go through the entire script and note down what expressions a character would have at each moment. Then you'll know exactly what you need to draw before you start drawing it.

I did that second strategy before, which is how I ended up with so many sprites in the first place lolol. There were way too many to manage.
Thanks for the advice!